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  PSU Art + Social Practice

  PSU Art + Social Practice

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  Celestina Billington

  Celestina Billington

  Celestina Billington is an artist and creative professional specializing in performance and public art. Her work is multidisciplinary and eschews easy identification, though she has most often been credited as a director, producer, writer and actress. Her work has displayed at theaters and in galleries around the world.

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  Adam Carlin

  Adam Carlin

  Adam Carlin is a sculptor and social practice artist that lives and works in Greensboro, North Carolina. He is currently the Director of Greensboro Project Space, an off-campus contemporary art center at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro, and Director of Community Engagement for UNCG’s College of Visual and Performing Arts where he creates and supports community engaged programs and advances partnerships between the college and the community. He is also co-Founder and co-Director of Creek Colleges, an organization that creates schools on the banks of rivers, lakes, and creeks that are going through active restoration. His work often takes the form of institutes as artworks that enact projects which highlight under-recognized histories, idiosyncratic activities, and public dynamics. Participation and collaboration are integral to his practice and he often work site and situation-specifically. He received a BFA from California College of the Arts and an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University.

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  Christy Chan

  Christy Chan

  Christy Chan is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland and working primarily in video, installation, performance and oral storytelling. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Kala Art Institute, Southern Exposure, Root Division, SOMarts, the Los Angeles Film Festival, and in storytelling venues such as NPR. She has been awarded residencies and support from the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, Project 387, Kala Art Institute, Headlands Center for the Arts and Real Time and Space in Oakland. Chan holds an M.A. in Communication Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University. She is working on the multimedia storytelling and film project Pen Pals which has been featured on NPR’s Snap Judgement and The New York Times and tells the story of Shelly, an 8-year-old girl who writes idealistic letters to the Ku Klux Klan after the Klan targets her family. Based on real-life events, Pen Pals draws on Chan's experience growing up in a Southern town with a white nativism movement, an experience that continues to inform her ongoing explorations of race, power, and what it means to be an American.

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  Roz Crews

  Roz Crews

  Roz Crews is an artist and educator currently living in rural North Florida and makes art projects about specific people and places Crews think about her practice as a service that can be activated in a variety of circumstances including but not limited to: universities and colleges, public schools, commercial and non-commercial galleries, art festivals, and bars.

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  Sarah Farahat

  Sarah Farahat

  Sarah Farahat is a transdisciplinary Egyptian American cultural worker, abolitionist, and educator dreaming of a more collective future amongst the rubble of capitalist empires. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from Occidental College in Los Angeles, California and a B.F.A. in Intermedia Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. In 2011, she participated in the prestigious Homeworkspace Program, located in Beirut, Lebanon. She received an M.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Fine Art from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California.

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  Zeph Fishlyn

  Zeph Fishlyn

  Zeph Fishlyn (pronouns they/them) is a Canadian-born, SF Bay Area-based interdisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural organizer. Zeph’s participatory projects, drawings, objects and interventions cultivate social and ideological mutations in urgent times.

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  Emily Fitzgerald

  Emily Fitzgerald

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  Harrell Fletcher

  Harrell Fletcher

  Harrell Fletcher received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from California College of the Arts. He studied organic farming at UCSC and went on to work on a variety of small Community Supported Agriculture farms, which impacted his work as an artist. Fletcher has produced a variety of socially engaged collaborative and interdisciplinary projects since the early 1990’s. His work has been shown at SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Wattis Institute, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Sculpture Center, The Wrong Gallery, Apex Art, and Smackmellon in NYC, DiverseWorks and Aurora Picture show in Houston, TX, PICA in Portland, OR, CoCA and The Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, WA, Signal in Malmo, Sweden, Domain de Kerguehennec in France, The Tate Modern in London, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. He was a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Fletcher has work in the collections of MoMA, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, SFMOMA, The Hammer Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum, The De Young Museum, and The FRAC Brittany, France. From 2002 to 2009 Fletcher co-produced Learning To Love You More, a participatory website with Miranda July. Fletcher is the 2005 recipient of the Alpert Award in Visual Arts. His exhibition The American War originated in 2005 at ArtPace in San Antonio, TX, and traveled to Solvent Space in Richmond, VA, White Columns in NYC, The Center For Advanced Visual Studies MIT in Boston, MA, PICA in Portland, OR, and LAXART in Los Angeles among other locations. Fletcher is a Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.

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  Mona Gazala

  Mona Gazala

  Mona Gazala is a Palestinian American artist whose work is rooted in the understanding that all struggles against oppression and systemic injustice are inherently related. Gazala is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores power dynamics and their relationships to marginalized peoples. Subjects range from the erasure of indigenous Palestinian and Indigenous American peoples and culture, to gentrification and the displacement of low-income families and people of color in urban centers. Whether focused on issues locally or globally, Gazala use visual art and social actions to amplify subversive narratives in situations of power imbalance, countering the effects of historical, cultural, and social erasure.

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  Avalon Kalin

  Avalon Kalin

  Avalon Kalin is a graphic artist who makes documentary and social art connected to everyday life. He was the co-author of The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal film produced by Matt Mccormick and he studied under the first Social Practice MFA program with Harrell Fletcher and Jen Delos Reyes at Portland State University. His work has shown in institutions and perhaps more importantly between friends. He collaborates with his wife Posie Kalin designing installations and products. Together they publish ViD: Journal of Visual Divination.

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  Jeff Kasper

  Jeff Kasper

  Jeff Kasper is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator, with a background in arts organizing and design. His scholarship and creative work focuses on visual art and graphic design as social practice. He prototypes pathways for support and engagement through objects, tools, social spaces, and workshops.

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  Laura Napier

  Laura Napier

  Laura Napier is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working in Houston, Texas (US). Napier produces projects exploring behavior, sociology, and place through participatory and collaborative works.

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  Salty Xi Jie Ng

  Salty Xi Jie Ng

  Salty Xi Jie Ng co-creates semi-fictional paradigms for the real and imagined lives of humans within the poetics of the intimate vernacular. Often playing with the aesthetics of social relations and structures, her interdisciplinary work is manifested from fantasy scores for the present and future that propose a collective re-imagining through humour, care, subversion, play, discomfort, a celebration of the eccentric, and a commitment to the deeply personal. Her practice dances across forms such as brief encounter, collaborative space, poem, conversation, meal, publication, film, performance.

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  Ameya Okamoto

  Ameya Okamoto

  Artist + organizer Ameya Okamoto is a dynamic 20-year-old whose creative work lives at the intersections of art and social justice. Her work has been profiled by Paper Magazine, NPR and Hyperallergic among others. In 2018, Ameya was announced a YoungArts Finalist in Visual Art and US Presidential Scholar in Art and was included in the NY Post's top 6 rising art stars at Miami Art Basel. She is a 2019 Adobe Creativity Scholar and Laidlaw Fellow, researching the role of protest art in social movements and sustainable beautification. She is the founder and creative director of IRRESISTIBLE, creating art for social change.

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  Molly Sherman

  Molly Sherman

  Molly Sherman is a designer, artist, and educator. Her practice spans client-based work and collaborative creative projects, while operating within the overlapping fields of graphic design and socially-engaged art.

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  Anke Shuettler

  Anke Shuettler

  Anke Schüttler is a social practice artist with a background in photography. Her projects are often inspired by the interaction with one person. Bringing a transformed version of that experience to a larger group of people, her work strives to foster social interactions between people who might not have connected otherwise. She likes to ask questions, challenge existing situations and put art into unusual places. Collaboration and collective thinking are inherent to her process which is all about learning from and giving back to the people she works with.

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  Cyrus W Smith

  Cyrus W. Smith

  Cyrus W. Smith is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in sculpture, interactive art, radio, publication, and performance. He was part of the first graduating class at Portland State University to receive an MFA with a concentration in “Social Practice,” a form of art that encourages interactivity, communication, and social engagement. Cyrus also worked on the exhibitions team for the Portland Art Museum and Tacoma Art Museum as an exhibit installer and designer. When he is not making art, you may find him playing music, taking the long way home, or sleeping under the stars.

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  Eric Steen

  Eric Steen

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  Kim Sutherland

  Kim Sutherland

  Kim Sutherland is an independent graphic designer and artist working between Portland OR, Brooklyn and Vancouver BC.

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  Lexa Walsh

  Lexa Walsh

  Lexa Walsh is an artist, cultural worker and experience maker based in Oakland, CA. Walsh makes projects, exhibitions, publications and objects. Inserted in her practice, she works as an arts laborer, organizer, curator and archivist. She employs social engagement, institutional critique, radical hospitality and community building in her work.

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  Christine Wong Yap

  Christine Wong Yap

  Christine Wong Yap (she/her) is a visual artist and social practitioner who works in community engagement, drawing, printmaking, and publishing to explore dimensions of psychological wellbeing, including belonging, resilience, interdependence, and collaboration. She partners with organizations to conduct participatory research projects whose outcomes include site-specific, public artworks, zines, and books. She has participated in over a dozen residencies and studio programs. A longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she has lived and worked in Queens, NY since 2010.